Issue 96: Kathleen Flenniken

KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN’S POETRY ranges from hard-hitting docupoetics to personal and domestic poems; in the words of Albert Goldbarth, “The surface range of Kathleen Flenniken’s . . . poems is admirably vast.” Her poems are emotionally-charged experiences characterized by intellect and honesty, and infused with a poignant national and ecological awareness. Flenniken’s humble, restrained style complements the disciplined formatting with which she shapes her poems. With a poetic voice that is wise but never dogmatic, her pages make space for readers to inhabit and return to.
Flenniken is the author of the poetry collections Famous (Nebraska 2006), Plume (University of Washington Press 2012), and Post Romantic (University of Washington Press 2020). She was Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2012-2014, during which she curated the website The Far Field, featuring the work of Washington State poets. Her writing has received numerous awards, such as a Pushcart Prize in 2012 and the Washington Book Award for Plume. She has received fellowships from the Artist Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hernewest collection, Dressing in the Dark, is forthcoming from Lynx House Press in September of 2025. In March of this year, we met with Flenniken for lunch and conversation at The Pearl Bar and Grille in downtown Ellensburg. Ahead of our meeting, she kindly sent us her new manuscript, Dressing in the Dark, in one of its earlier iterations titled, Waking. We were thrilled to review and discuss her new book, along with her poetic journey, work as an engineer, experiences growing up in the Tri-Cities near the Hanford Site, cancer recovery, writing practices, and her process for getting a draft ready for publication.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

Can you talk about your experience as Washington State Poet Laureate?

KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN

I was the first after a hiatus. Sam Green was poet laureate from 2007 to 2009, and then the program went dormant until 2012,
so part of my job was getting it rolling again. My special concentration was third, fourth, and fifth graders. And I edited an online blog/magazine I called The Far Field. I invited people from around the state to contribute poems. I ended up with more than 350 poets. The site is still searchable. I was coming to the poet laureate program as an editor at Floating Bridge Press, and Floating Bridge’s whole concentration is Washington State poetry, so I wanted to showcase the the rich Washington State poetry world I already knew.

ABBY SHAFFER

Do you still work with third graders?

FLENNIKEN

I did until I retired about two years ago from Writers in the Schools. I love third, fourth, and fifth graders. They’re verycapable writers, they have easy access to their imaginations, and they have no self-consciousness. It’s a wonderful combination. They want to perform. You have to set them up and make them feel comfortable and confident that they have something to write about, but once they have that security, they’re just great. Their similes and metaphors are amazing. I bring in challenging poems, we’ll talk through them, and I’ll ask them questions: what do you notice, show me the similes, which is your favorite line? They’re able to talk about poetry. That’s one of my goals, too, to show children that they don’t need to be afraid of poetry. They have, in me, somebody who really loves the art, and I try to demonstrate that they can love it, too.

JEFF THOMAS

How did you start writing poetry? What was the initial intrigue that drew you to the art form, and what inspires you now to keep returning?

FLENNIKEN

I got two degrees in civil engineering and worked as an engineer out of college. Then I took a break from that career to have my second son. I was home and feeling at loose ends; I needed something to get me out of the house. My brother had sent me a Lindsay Buckingham album called Out of the Cradle. I played it over and over. I knew it was the title of a Whitman poem, but I wanted to know the poem. This is before the internet, so I went to the library and checked out an anthology containing the poem and a lot of others by 20th century American poets. For the first time in my life, I was reading poetry on my own terms as opposed to reading it for a class. I could turn the page if I didn’t like the poem instead of feeling inferior because I didn’t appreciate it. All of a sudden I found myself really loving reading these poems. A few months later, I found an introductory poetry class in an experimental college catalog. I needed to get out of the house, so I took this night class on poetry writing and never looked back. I just loved it. I loved meeting all these newpoets. I had a wonderful teacher, Mike Hickey. He ended up being the Seattle Poet Populist years later. Wonderful person and writer. He was so enthusiastic and made room for all of us. We had these conversations about poetry I didn’t know I would enjoy so much. When it comes to the “Big P” poetry world, I’ve always felt a little bit like an outsider because I came from this unconventional background and started late, well into my 30s. You asked about what keeps me writing poetry. I’ve always had the impulse to make—whether that was poems or music. When I was a child, I played piano. But as an adult it became words. Poems helped me get what’s inside out. I’m very drawn to simile and metaphor. Simile is the ugly stepsister in the metaphor world. I think poets don’t value similes enough. They’re viewed as simplistic, but I don’t think so at all. Alice Oswald compares metaphor to compression and simile to addition. She calls simile feminine, and likens it to pregnancy. That idea speaks to me. What I love about writing is taking something I know, and feel, and finding an analogy for it. That’s really all poetry is. Poetry is simile.

GRACE ANNE ANDERSON

What was it like to leave your career as an engineer?

FLENNIKEN

I graduated with an engineering degree in 1983. That was the peak of women in engineering. I really liked the idea of being part of opening up a whole engineering world with women’s perspectives. I wanted to be part of that. But I didn’t love the work. It didn’t inspire my imagination at all. I decided to stay home with our kids and went on a sort of sabbatical from my job. I was groping for something, something to shape my world besides just the family. And that’s when I found that anthology of poems and never looked back.

BUCKINGHAM

The engineering background obviously has an effect on Plume, but how else does the engineering part of your brain fit into your poetry?

FLENNIKEN

It informs my sensibility, my preference for clean surfaces. I’m drawn to poems that reveal a mind in action. All poems should go someplace unexpected. That unfolding of the mind is what really draws me, more even than language. I mean, interesting and precise language is essential too.

SHAFFER

Especially in Plume, you have to use a lot of technical language. How do you balance using the most precise language with what a poem should sound like? Do you struggle with that?

FLENNIKEN

No. Sound is always my guide. When I’m writing a poem, it’s as much sound as anything that draws me to the next line, though I also have a little bank of words available in my mind for the right moment. Using technical words was important to me. I wanted everything in that book to be true and accurate because I knew the audience might be a little different than the usual poetry audience. Engineers and scientists and others interested in the Hanford story might be reading it. But I wanted the poems to be real poems, first of all, not just little statements of opinion.

ANNALEE FAIRLEY

Is the composition of poetry spontaneous for you, or does a poem ruminate in your mind for weeks before you can write it?

FLENNIKEN

It can be both. I always feel like I write poetry the wrong way. I tend to wait for inspiration, which you’re not supposed to doat all. I tend to write on a computer, while I think it’s better to write free hand. And I sometimes do want to write about something; that’s also sort of frowned upon by the purists. But while writing about something calls me to the page, a subject is not enough. If I don’t have a first line, or a first image, or a voice I trust, I don’t have an entry. So I do carry poems around for a while. And once in a while, I just need to get down and start writing something, anything, so I feel like a poet again. Then I might free write to try to get going.

THOMAS

How do you know when a draft of a poem is finished?

FLENNIKEN

I often don’t know. I jump the gun pretty frequently. My poems seem to take forever. I’ll write the first draft or the first few drafts in a couple weeks. I think, oh, it’s close, it’s maybe 85%. Then the last 15% may take years to finish. Sanding and polishing takes me forever. It may mean sending the poem out to a magazine to see if it’ll get published, and it comes back rejected. There is some value to getting a poem back from the rejection pile because you have a brief opportunity to really see it critically. Other times I realize after some period of months or a year that a stanza doesn’t fit or doesn’t sit right. I didn’t see it before, but now time has opened my eyes. Time is a great healer for poetry. But it does take a very long time. And even as I’m working on this Dressing in the Dark manuscript that has a publication date approaching, I’m still making slight changes, a word here, a different line break. I’m polishing all the way to press.

SHAFFER

A lot of your poems have regular stanzas—a lot of tercets, quatrains, couplets. Is that a choice early on in the writing, or do you revise towards that?

FLENNIKEN

For the first seven or eight years of my serious writing life, I wanted to write in tercets. I was reading a lot of poems in tercets, and I just loved the imposed order, the way the sentences sounded as they cascaded down the page, almost like a waterfall. There’s a lot of enjambment. I was very attracted to the form, and yet I could not make my poems fit. They felt like they were wearing the wrong size suit. I would sometimes impose tercets as an editing technique, to isolate and kick out the parts that didn’t need to be there. That was useful, but I still couldn’t finish the poem in those tercets. Looking back, I’d call the first poem I finished in tercets as the true beginning of my first book. Tercets or couplets are my fallback. It helps me edit, and it helps me hear the music. I tune the poem toward that form. Once in a while I don’t hear that rhythm, so I try something else. But my go-to is three-line stanzas I think because it took so long for me to get there.

SHAFFER

There’s a lot of tension in a tercet.

FLENNIKEN

There is. I love that tension. I love the little moments of suspense between the end of a line and the start of the next line or the end of a stanza and the start of the next stanza, not knowing what’s going to come next. Sometimes you can play with that and have a little joke imbedded in the enjambment or some left turn the reader won’t be expecting. I seem to have more access to that play in regular forms than I do in free verse.

ANDERSON

I’m curious about what the process was like for incorporating documents into poetry.

FLENNIKEN

You’re thinking of Plume. First, a document has to speak to me in some way. Just because it’s factual or it fits with the story I’mtrying to tell doesn’t mean it moves me to write a poem. That can be very frustrating. I think, I have a spot here for this, or riffing off this document is going to work so well—but I can’t write the poem. So I read the documents, and I sit with my reading for a while. Months, maybe. I let it filter down. For Plume I chose three documents and tried blacking out lines to get at some of the messages I wanted to include, and that time I was successful. Those three “redactions” helped me communicate the competing visions of the Hanford scientific community and of the outside world. I put a lot of information in the notes in the back of the book that wouldn’t fit in the poems. The data and history and background was too heavy, too freighted, for the poems themselves, and yet it was information I wanted to be available to bolster my case. Hanford is a story that not a lot of people know. Probably most Americans have never heard of Hanford, even though it’s the most contaminated waste site in our hemisphere. The poems in Plume tell the Hanford story but it’s incredibly complicated and they need each other for company. A single poem in a magazine just didn’t work. What’s this supposed to be about? But if the poems could be together, under one cover, with notes in the back, they could build a world.

FAIRLEY

Plume falls in the tradition of ecopoetics, and even Post Romantic does. Are you influenced by ecopoetics or see yourself writing in that tradition? Are there writers who inspire you in that regards?

FLENNIKEN

I don’t because that’s very intimidating. I always have to go at something large through a small door. It has to be personal, which does not mean I don’t appreciate ecopoetics. But I don’t consider myself of that school. When I was writing Plume, I was very influenced by Martha Collins, whose book Blue Front considers a lynching in Cairo, Illinois in 1905, which her father witnessed when he was a very small child. Her father was her entry point into the enormous subject of racism. It was personal. I focused my writing on my memories of being a kid in Richland, and my friend Carolyn, and her dad, who eventually died of a radiation illness. If I think, I’m going to write about the environment, or nuclear waste, I can’t do it. It’s too big. But I can write about wind turbines I see on the Gorge highway I’ve known since childhood and hope it stands for something larger.

ANDERSON

You described Plume as taking a huge subject and going at it through a small door. I feel like Famous is kind of the opposite of that—like, smaller movements or ideas and then making them larger. How would you describe Dressing in the Dark?

FLENNIKEN

The new book is far more like Famous than Plume. I think I’ve moved forward since Famous. One of the reasons these poems are harder to write is I’m trying to do a bit more with them, and now I’m preoccupied with memory, which comes with being 20-25 years older. But I’m again looking at domestic life and trying to find the universal in it.

THOMAS

What kind of research do you do when it comes to writing personal domestic topics? How do you know that you’ve found a new way into a familiar subject?

FLENNIKEN

Just living. Domestic poems are easy in the sense that I’ve lived the material already, so I just have to let it trickle down and hope there’s a poem there. I know many poets journal to find their material, but my method is the opposite. Anything that stayswith me, that I don’t forget or lose interest in, might be worth writing about. I don’t think I could add one of my old poems to the new book and make it fit. I would hear the difference in the voice and the life experience, and I wouldn’t be able to mesh the two. I read—I think this is so interesting—that Robert Frost started a huge number of his best poems in the few years he lived in England, I think 1912 to 1915. Every book he wrote was seeded with a few poems from that period, and the new poems would coalesce around them. He did that over and over again. His poems essentially never changed with time. He was criticized during World War II because he didn’t really respond to fascism the way other poets did. It’s in part because he was still digging that same vein of ore that he had since the very beginning. I think that’s fascinating; he’s on a whole other plane. I’m a mere mortal. My voice has changed, my life experience has changed, and my outlook on the world has changed. Certainly, the world has changed. I may be approaching similar subjects, but the poems don’t have the same outcome.

THOMAS

What do you notice with the latest collection and writing the personal versus what you saw or felt with previous work?

FLENNIKEN

There’s more gray area to explore as I get older. There are more things I don’t know, It’s harder to shape a poem about not knowing something. I like the potential of a poem that is being built in a very gray zone because there’s so many ways it could go. It’s harder to write, but it’s also more gratifying.

FAIRLEY

Does the poem ever go sour and you give up on it, or do you continue to try to make it work?

FLENNIKEN

I give up a lot. I have a lot of poems I might have worked on a long time, and I can’t fix them. Or they’re no longer interesting. If they don’t interest me, they’re not going to interest anybody else. It takes me time to figure that out. I often find that poems about something are easier to write. They feel like I’m coming out of myself a little bit. I get tired of the poems always being about what’s going on inside.

BUCKINGHAM

The older stuff is more exterior, and Dressing in the Dark more interior.

FLENNIKEN

Yes. In Dressing in the Dark, I allowed myself to go interior without being critical, self-critical about being self-absorbed.

SHAFFER

Do you worry about self-indulgence?

FLENNIKEN

I do. That’s always a concern to me. Too many I’s. I’ll find myself counting I’s in poems. Oh my God, there’s too many I’s. Someone said once, very casually, never start a poem with an I. I took that to heart.

SHAFFER

That’s so interesting given that you started with Whitman. He’s the most self-indulgent poet I’ve ever read. I love him. He’s just very indulgent.

FLENNIKEN

Well, he’s the universal I. The larger than life I. That’s what you hope to achieve. But who am I to think I could achieve a universal I? It’s very hard, and in the current political climate, probably not possible. I do like looking outside of myself because it feels more like a conversation than a monologue.

THOMAS

Some of the poems in the new collection are in second person. I was fascinated by the authority in those poems. Do you start writing a poem and then change it to second person, or do you start in second person?

FLENNIKEN

I don’t know how many, but several poems in the new manuscript are actually written to my lost breast as though it were a friend, a lost friend. I felt an immediate intimacy. I didn’t have to explain. We’ve been through so much together. I can go straight to the heart of it. Then the reader is just listening in on a conversation, and if the poem works, they’ll be able to understand what’s going on. When I’m able to enter that second person voice, I do think that authority comes very quickly for me as a writer. I’m writing a letter in a way. And I love writing letters, so it feels much more natural. I trust my voice more quickly. It’s almost a relief when I’m able to find a way into a poem with a you.

THOMAS

You were talking about restraint and how that’s important to you—not being self-indulgent. With the breast cancer poems, which is such emotionally-charged material, how do you assess sentimentality when you’re going through the editing process?

FLENNIKEN

I do feel I am a sentimental poet. For me, that’s not a bad word. I know that there are terrible sentimental poems, but I don’t try not to be sentimental. I just try to be as truthful about myself as I am about anything else, not sugarcoating anything. I measure the poem by how accurate it feels when it’s done, and craft is part of it too, making sure it’s crafted as well as I know how. That helps me discover whether it works or not. And then just living with it for a while. Can I bear for anyone else to see this? If I can’t, then I don’t. And that’s about the emotion, too. Is this too raw? Too untransformed? I need to make sure that it’s a poem and not just a journal entry. That’s about craft, that’s about restraint of a certain emotional kind. If it all adds up and I can sit with it and be comfortable with it, then I think it’s something I can share.

BUCKINGHAM

I like the idea that the tightness of the craft is working as a counterbalance to the content of the poem.

FLENNIKEN

Right. When you have a container for your emotions, it gives them shape. Otherwise, they’re shapeless, they’re running out of the corners, and that’s kind of uncomfortable. But if you have the shape you get from form, and craft, then you have a place to put everything. And it’s not just a skeleton, it’s filled out with emotion. So it’s very cooperative.

ANDERSON

In an interview with Poetry Northwest, you said you had a project in mind for Post Romantic when you set out to write it. You said what draws you to the page is writing “about” something. How was it different when you were putting together Dressing in the Dark?

FLENNIKEN

Yeah. I didn’t choose the subject. I went through breast cancer surgery and then recovery. And there is a little bit of the pandemic in the manuscript, too, which I didn’t want to highlight but couldn’t completely ignore. I felt called to write about my recovery, and the only way I knew how was through poems. And then once I had those poems, all these other parts of my life started to stick to the breast cancer poems. Some of them were about very different subjects, but even though they weren’t about my recovery, they filled in as though they were. I found that magical, actually, that these poems could serve as metaphors. So the manuscript started to form itself. This book came together quicker than any other book I’ve written. It’s very small. But it felt complete more quickly too.

SHAFFER

It’s interesting you talk about these poems being about recovery when the poems are also so much about waking and coming out of a long sleep. How do you think about recovery as a type of waking?

I think my body recovered more quickly than my mind. I had to accept my new body, wake up to my new sense of mortality, and that dragged behind my actual physical recovery. I was lucky because my cancer was caught early. Death was never on the table. I didn’t need chemotherapy or radiation therapy that so many women go through. For me, it was really about losing part of my physical self. And as a poet, looking on, I found that interesting. I could have a dialogue with myself.

SHAFFER

I’m also curious about the Roethke poem.

FLENNIKEN

Yes, the epigraph. That came very late. The line “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow” is such a wonderful paradoxical line, and I was feeling some paradox in these poems. So I went back to the poem, “The Waking,” and found in that last stanza these three lines together. “What falls away is always. And is near. / I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.” It totally clicked—this is what I want to build the manuscript around. It helped me order the poems, and it helped me understand the phases of my recovery, and it gave shape to the manuscript. The idea of waking was really central to me, so that’s why it became the first title of the manuscript [Waking]. I don’t always take advice, but I did have a close reader tell me that title doesn’t speak very loudly. And as much as I hated to hear it, I understood. So I tried another title, I Take My Waking Slow. But then the title started to feel more like Roethke’s than mine. It was actually only in the last week or so that I sat down and pored over the manuscript. I was listing phrases I thought could work as titles, and twice I wrote down Dressing in the Dark. Given where that comes from in the manuscript, from the poem “The Cat, Is Missing, Day Eight,” that best suggested the ideas in the manuscript.

SHAFFER

It’s like going from night into day and going out into the world.

FLENNIKEN

Yeah. And not necessarily wanting to look at yourself, too. There’s some element of that.

BUCKINGHAM

In “61” and in “Late in Life Tomatoes,” there is a theme of acceptance—I thought I would be this person, I’m not this person, this is who I am—not just accepting, but in celebration of that.

FLENNIKEN

Yeah. I wrote those early breast cancer poems, and then I wrote dark stuff for a while. But this world is very dark, and I was tired of dark. I was completely tired of dark. I don’t live that way either. I have inherited my mother’s optimistic outlook and I wanted my nature to be reflected in the poems. Whenever I was feeling the world in a good way, I would try to work with that. I think of those two poems as sister poems. They’re about trying to accept the self I have.

FAIRLEY

In an interview with John W. Marshall, he asked if Plume was a memoir in poetry. You replied, “Is it still a memoir if I’m not at the center?” Dressing in the Dark does feel more in the center of your body, at least. I was wondering if you consider Dressing in the Dark as more of a memoir.

FLENNIKEN

It does feel more intimate than I’ve allowed myself to write in the past. I don’t know if I’d call it a memoir. I don’t know if there’s enough of the world around me to make it a memoir, but I am dead center in the middle of it. For good or for ill.

FAIRLEY

Plume and Post Romantic feel more closely related in theme and more abundant in language and scope than your newest collection, which feels more like it’s reaching out and seeking language. Did you find these poems more difficult to write than the other two collections, or did you struggle with the process of putting it together?

FLENNIKEN

The longer I write the harder it is to write. I question myself all the time. I’m one of those people who thinks, well, that’s the last poem I’ll ever write. I’ve been like that for years. Experience demonstrates that I do keep going, so I have to trust that. Post Romantic was very hard to complete because I had the title early on and I had this concept. I thought, oh, I’ve written Plume, so now all my books are going to be projects. I thought, experienced poets work in projects, so now I’m going to work in projects. I had this concept of a long marriage viewed against my relationship with my country and how they’re parallel loves. I would bring them together, and there would be this enlightening conversation between the two. I could not write that book. I wanted to in the worst way, but I couldn’t, so I had to be satisfied with what I could write. I was happy with the marriage part of that book. I found the America poems to be almost impossible. I don’t view them as political poems, they’re personal poems about a love gone sour, and those sorts of love poems are so difficult to make fresh or new. So I had to make concessions. The shadow of that original idea is there, but I wasn’t enough of a poet to make it work out exactly as I imagined.

BUCKINGHAM

It does feel like abandoning the original concept is often the right thing to do. Has your opinion on how soon in the process that concept comes changed over time?

FLENNIKEN

Yes. With this newest, I thought, I am not going to put a project on the table. I’m just going to write the poems I’m writing. And yes, I was writing breast cancer poems because that’s what I was going through. But I refused to call it that at first. I wrote more breast cancer poems in a second wind but I didn’t like most of them and pulled them out. And then I did discover that some new poems I’d written about memory, about my mother, about motherhood, were fitting together with the breast poems. I didn’t title the collection until the very end because of that trouble I’d had with Post Romantic.

BUCKINGHAM

Whereas Plume could not have been anything else.

FLENNIKEN

Right. Plume originally was just going to be a series of poems. I could never have started if I’d thought of it as a whole book from the beginning. I was writing about something far larger than me, which was intimidating. So I had to keep my eye very focused on the near until I had so many poems that it was like, okay, now I have enough that I actually do have a whole book.

BUCKINGHAM

What part did you play in the design of that book? It’s incredible.

FLENNIKEN

Isn’t it amazing? This is one of the great joys of working with a publisher that has a designer in-house. I said, “Do whatever you want. I just want to make sure that the definition of the word ‘plume’ is very clear from the cover. So not a feather plume, not a writing plume, but a plume of pollution.” Ashley Saliba was the designer. Because the office was in Seattle, I was able to go in for a visit, and when she met me she was carrying a draft of the cover, and I got shivers. It was so expressive of the pollution without being explicit at all. And then those big letters, PLUME in bright radioactive green against a background green the same color as the control panels in the historic reactors on the Hanford site. I have a picture of myself holding my book in front of a reactor control panel, and it’s the same color. Ashley did all of that just by instinct. She designed the interior, too, and figured out how to make the redactions, which were very finicky, work. She’s just a genius. That book won a national design award.

FAIRLEY

Is she designing your new book cover?

FLENNIKEN

No. But my daughter is, which I’m really excited about. My daughter is a designer. I absolutely love the cover of Dressing in the Dark.

FAIRLEY

There’s this theme of silence inhabiting the poems of Dressing in the Dark. The poem “In My Hand” reads, “Silence strikes me now as the truest answer for what’s missing.” From these lines, I gathered a kind of thesis of the book. Throughout the collection, the speaker’s asking questions to the mother: “What did you do with the extra time?”, asking questions to the self: “Haven’t I worn in my mind by now?” and “Why couldn’t I master my tangled poems?”, and even asking a nameless bird questions, “Is this forgetting just another lesson in humility?” And the answers always seem to be made up of silence.

FLENNIKEN

That’s a very good way to say, “I don’t know the answer.”

FAIRLEY

Yeah. As a reader, I don’t get the answers, and it seems at the end the speaker is still searching. I was curious about the theme of silence in this collection, and in what ways is silence related to grief?

FLENNIKEN

God, this is a great question. The silence at the very center of this collection is the silence of the breast that is no longer there. You lose your feeling where that breast was, and part of recovery is coping with that. If you lose vision in part of your eye, your brain will compensate and your eye tells you it can see everything. The nerves around the breast do that, too, I’m learning. They make me think I can feel what I can’t feel. It’s this wonderful compensatory kindness of the body that amazes me. So silence is at the book’s kernel, but recovery seems to be asking questions even if I don’t have answers. Maybe the questions create a kind of cloud around the silence that feels comforting. I’m growing more comfortable all the time with the fact that there aren’t answers. One of the arcs in the book is coming to a kind of comfort with not knowing.

BUCKINGHAM

Like “In a Watershed Year”—an acceptance of not knowing, a comfortability in not knowing, like Keats’ negative capability.

FLENNIKEN

Yeah, me and Keats. That’s definitely my pandemic poem. When we’re all in it together, somehow it’s communal and connecting to have those questions because we all have the same questions, I think.

SHAFFER

You mentioned before that you’ve been part of a writing group for over twenty years. How has that collaboration influenced your writing process? Do you have any advice for young writers who are trying to build communities of their own?

FLENNIKEN

I love my poetry group. The first very practical advantage is that I know we’re going to be meeting, so I need to have a poem; it urges me to write. Second is just to have people on my side. Writing can be really lonely, as you know, especially if I feel like I’m not doing as well as I should, or everyone else seems to be excelling and I’m not. It feels good to have compatriots. It’s not important that they write the same way I do. It’s even okay if we don’t write in the same genre. The best thing we can do is to be there for each other, and be witness for each other. I also like the idea of a long-term relationship with other writers because they come to know your work deeply. They know your voice, they know what you’re going to do next, and they can call you on the stuff you’ve done over and over again. When I’m finishing up a poem, I can hear my friend Peter say, “I think the poem ends one line earlier.” I can anticipate what he would say, and I do it for myself instead. That’s so helpful. Not everyone needs a group. Some people are loners, and they don’t like input on their work. That’s to be completely respected. Some groups, some people, need only encouragement. They don’t want criticism. There’s a lot to be said for a group like that. Not everyone needs critique. But if you do have a critique group, it begins with respect for each other. You learn to know each other, you champion each other. It’s been a godsend for me. Yeah, I love it.

SHAFFER

How did you find those people?

FLENNIKEN

The original group came out of that night class I took with Mike Hickey. It has changed through the years. In fact, I’d say it actually represents three different groups. One ended, and then another one started, and that ended, but there’s some overlap in all three. You look for kind people who are open to learning and to difference. We can tell when the balance is right, and when it is, we guard it with our lives.

BUCKINGHAM

While we were having lunch, you said Linda Bierds told you something that caused you to work on a manuscript for another four months. Could you talk about that a little more?

FLENNIKEN

Sure. So, it’s been a huge honor. I’ve worked with two wonderful editors. My first was Hilda Raz at Prairie Schooner, and the second has been my editor on the last three books, Linda Bierds. She’s the editor of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, an amazing poet, a MacArthur Fellow, and she’s been a wonderful reader and editor for me. When I submitted Post Romantic to her a few years ago, she read it and replied that she was interested but didn’t think it was ready, that I had every right to take it somewhere else, but she would like to see it again. She listed one paragraph of ideas, things she saw that she liked and wanted more of, things she thought didn’t work so well, but they were said in very broad terms. I worked for six months on the manuscript based on that one paragraph of feedback. That’s what you get from a really insightful editor who gets straight to the heart of things. It doesn’t mean pages and pages of response. Post Romantic is a braided collection. It only has one section, so the poems are rubbing up against each other. One poem seems to suggest another. In one case, there’s a poem about my son pulling an imaginary sword out of a stone as he’s listening to me read the story of King Arthur; the last line in that poem mentions the blade. The following poem describes the blade of a Chernobyl helicopter. Most people wouldn’t notice it, but there’s a connection. Linda wanted more of those intuitive connections. I immediately understood. She said all that in one sentence—better than I’m doing.

ANDERSON

I noticed on your website, which is wonderful, that there are a lot of types of interdisciplinary collaboration, like music composition and documentaries, that pull from your work. How does that shape how you view your own work? And how much collaboration was there with some of those projects? What was that like?

FLENNIKEN

Those collaborations were really on the side of the other artists who were using my poems, specifically Plume, as a jumping-off place. Plume has had a life of its own. It’s been a great privilege to see that book go out into the world to audiences who are not necessarily poetry audiences, people more concerned with the subject of the book than with poetry, and also to inspire other artists in their work around Hanford. The filmmaker Irene Lusztig discovered my poems early on when she was making the film Richland, and she found it useful to ask the residents of Richland she was interviewing to choose a poem to read aloud. Four of those readings made it into her film. Reginald Unterseher, a composer in the Tri-Cities, used four of the poems in Plume as the lyrics for his compositions. It’s been a huge gift.

ANDERSON

Would you consider yourself an interdisciplinary artist? Do you create in any other mediums?

FLENNIKEN

I don’t really perform in other mediums. Professionally speaking, I’m just a poet. But I love playing. I’m taking a class right now called “Haiku Comics” from the marvelous David Lasky, which is really fun. I’m terrible at haiku and I’m terrible at drawing, so it’s a good combination for me. In the same vein, I wrote a screenplay a year ago set in Montana. I’ve worked on other kinds of writing just simply to bring the joy back because I’m so hard on myself when I’m writing poems, and it gets to be a drag sometimes. You need to return to something that helps you you remember, oh, I actually really enjoy writing, you know? It’s important to get to your joy.

ANDERSON

What else do you enjoy? Not just professionally.

FLENNIKEN

I’m growing to love travel more and more as we get a bit older. I walk every day and go to the gym. I love my TV shows, which are a mix of drama, and HGTV, and comedy. And I love writing letters. I like to cook. I love feeding my family. My friends are very important to me. I’m in the going-out-for-lunch stage of my life and that’s a very good stage.

SHAFFER

I noticed that after you write about being called back into your body at the end of Dressing in the Dark, in the third section, the poems that follow are rich with images of food. There’s so much food in that third section. There’s restaurant food, garden food, junk food, seafood, diet food, home-cooked food, and family food. This is immediately following the epigraph of the third section which is “I learn by going where I have to go.” How does your relationship with food and eating help you think about the world around you?

FLENNIKEN

Fascinating observation which I was completely unaware of. The whole world I feel through food. I love to eat, but I find writing about food actually really challenging. It’s hard to get the pleasure across to someone else. And it can’t be just a list of food, although I do list food. That’s why I don’t take it on as a main subject—because I struggle to evoke the sensual pleasures of food in a fresh way. I have a really hard time with the cooking reality shows because I can’t taste the food, except of course The Great British Bake Off.

SHAFFER

When you write about really embodied topics, like a feeling in your body or eating something, is it difficult to access in language because it’s so sensory?

FLENNIKEN

The kind of challenge that a poet loves, right? I don’t feel like I have the skill set for describing embodied experiences so much, especially food, and I have always been reticent about writing about sex. That’s not my lane; I’m too reserved to write about it in the way it fully deserves, so I leave that for other people to do.

BUCKINGHAM

It’s interesting that the beginning of Dressing in the Dark is surgery, and the end is this richness.

FLENNIKEN

I just love that you see it that way. That’s wonderful.

ANDERSON

You borrow lines in this new collection from Adrienne Rich, Stephen Dobyns, and also from young students. I was wondering what that collaboration was like.

FLENNIKEN

I think if I didn’t read, I would stop writing. That’s what sparks my imagination. When I see what other people are doing with their lines and with their poems, it makes me want to be part of that conversation. Sometimes I come across lines that are a wonderful jumping off place like the Adrienne Rich piece. In almost every book, I have a poem dedicated to a poet or about a poet, usually multiple poets.

BUCKINGHAM

What are you reading?

FLENNIKEN

Right now, a lot of murder mysteries. I’m in the middle of Richard Hugo’s murder mystery about Montana; that’s really fun and a bit weird. One of my favorite books this year was All Fours by Miranda July. Loved that. I’ve actually been part of a poetry book club since 2017. One book we read recently that I loved is by a non-poet writing a book of poetry, No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck by Joan Wickersham. It’s all about the Vasa, the ship that sunk in the Stockholm harbor 300 years ago. They brought it to the surface in the 1950s and built a whole museum around it. She was there not expecting to like it at all. She became so obsessed with this ship, she went back like ten times to write about it. The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher I thought was just magnificent. It’s a book of prose poems—every poem has the title “The Ruins of Nostalgia”; they’re just like jewels. It reminds me a lot of Victoria Chang’s book Obit in structure. I wish it would get more attention. We read Lucia Perillo recently. I highly recommend her she’s a poet from Washington State who died about five years ago. She’s absolutely brilliant. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s brutally honest. I hate to name names because I hate to leave people out. We’re going to read Anne Carson’s new book, Wrong Norma, this month. That’s waiting for me when I get home.

THOMAS

Do you think of yourself as a Washington poet? Who are some other Washington poets that you see yourself maybe in a group with or who are part of this tradition?

FLENNIKEN

One of my first poets was Theodore Roethke. Before I ever wrote my first poem, I was a graduate student at the University of Washington in engineering, and The Daily, their newspaper, printed his poem “Dolor” I loved it so much I cut it out and put it in my drawer, and every once in a while I’d pull it out and read it. I should have attended to what it was telling me. It’s about the extreme boredom of office work. It begins: “I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.” I should have realized it was a message to me that I should not go into engineering, but I wasn’t listening properly. The problem with good poems is you have to listen to them. I do think of myself as a Northwest poet, maybe a Washington State poet. Who else should I mention? Christopher Howell is an amazing poet; Richard Hugo, who we share with Montana but is an important voice in the Northwest; Linda Bierds, who carved her own route through poetry by taking history and her own voice and melding them, applying her voice to other characters in ways, which I think is fascinating. And my poet friends.

THOMAS

We just read Martha Silano’s new book with Lynx House. It was phenomenal.

FLENNIKEN

Yes. I just wrote a review of The One We Call Ours for Lily Poetry Review. So huge, and so full of heart. What I love about that book is that it’s not a doomsday book. The humans that created this impossible situation with our environment are the same humans that she gives all of this leeway and joy and love to. I love that she includes both sides of it. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but she’s not really blaming so much.

BUCKINGHAM

Do you see yourself in any other school of writers or any that you share some sensibilities with or are influenced by?

FLENNIKEN

I used to want to see myself as part of the “old white guy” group of poets who were given permission to write about anything. They’d write about driving down the highway to get their motorcycle fixed or going fishing. There was nothing they couldn’t write about. In a spiritual sense, I love that idea of being able to write about doing laundry or taking care of the kids. Obviously, the world has changed a lot and so many more people need to damn the permission slips and speak, but I also need to let myself speak, too. Those guys were the ultimate models of permission. Like, I am going to write about putting leaves in bags and taking them out to the garbage. I love that permission. Back in the day, that’s what allowed me to see myself writing poems.

BUCKINGHAM

How are you feeling right now that we’re losing security and safety markers at places like Hanford?

FLENNIKEN

There’s a threat that the government is going to reclassify high-level nuclear waste as low-level waste. It’s a very, very serious issue. Frankly, I can’t really look at the news right now. Clearly, I wasn’t able to determine the outcome of the election. I’m retrenching and hoping that the people who should have known better will understand their irresponsibility and move in the right direction. I’m hoping that the people who work at Hanford will get the funding they require. It will be hard on them. The community at Hanford is mostly conservative. There’s some complicated self-examination required.

BUCKINGHAM

In this political climate, amidst climate change, authoritarianism here and around the world, what does it mean to be producing art?

FLENNIKEN

I love going to poetry to walk in someone else’s shoes, to try on someone else’s life and see what that feels like. It’s a way of learning about the world that I would never otherwise know. Those poems, those books, need to keep being written so that we can learn and remember empathy. If we could just try to keep talking to each other—what worries me is when we become so polarized that we stop talking to each other. I think art of all kinds is essential to keeping those conversations going—poetry and also music and art help us describe what it’s like to be alive. I do think that builds empathy and we’re sorely missing that right now.

BUCKINGHAM

Your books have a political conscience. Plume certainly does, and it’s in Post Romantic, and it’s even in Dressing in the Dark a little bit.

FLENNIKEN

I don’t set out to write political poems. To me those are personal poems. But I do have my own relationship with my country; it’s personal and it’s very troubled. I’m trying to get that out on the page. It helps me process what I’m going through.

BUCKINGHAM

The poems are in conversation with their surroundings and with a conscience, which not all poetry has. And in Post Romantic, there’s that nostalgia.

FLENNIKEN

There’s a lot of nostalgia. When I first started writing poems, all I wanted to write about was what was happening in my lifeat that moment—my parents passing away, my marriage, my children growing up. It was a very domestic and very small world. And now what I find myself writing about over and over again is looking back, remembering childhood and even beyond that. But I hope it’s a complicated nostalgia, in search of truth.

SHAFFER

I was fascinated in your new collection when you wrote that you remember your childhood self as if she were your own child. You also write that “mothers are haunted by the children that their children used to be.” I wanted to know if you feel like your childhood self is haunting you when you’re writing and if you feel like you’re, in a way, caring for her when you write about her.

FLENNIKEN

Yes. That’s so well said. I do feel like I have a chance to love that child and be kind to that child in ways that I wasn’t always kind to myself at the time. I understand her so much better than she understood herself. And that’s a gift, to be able to round the corners of my young self. I do indulge in that, and it feels good.